Longtime readers know I like movies. They’re fun as a stand-alone proposition.

But movie-going is almost essential when Arizona’s solar-intensifying sprummer has come, gone, and Satan’s excessive heat warning says it’s 109 outside. Overnight it ‘cools down’ to the high 90’s.

So when outdoor activity partners with heat stroke, getting out often means movies. This weekend, it was Wonder Woman — highly enjoyable and big fun. Although I enjoy all genres, there’s nothing like a well done action film.

As some of you know, I’ve also seen my share of movies featuring lawyer protagonists. Admittedly, it’s been a while since there was one I liked. The Lincoln Lawyer is perhaps the last one I thought entertaining — but that was 6 years ago.

It’s not like I rush to see movies featuring lawyers. Quite the opposite. I think most are to be avoided. 2014’s The Judge was awful.

Nearly always they get the law and the ethics wrong. For instance, I missed last year’s The Whole Truth, starring that latter-day Olivier, the wooden thespian known as Keanu Reeves. I’m sorry to say I finally caught it online.

Of The Whole Truth, movie critic Rex Reed said,“A guaranteed cure for insomnia, an abomination called The Whole Truth is a courtroom movie that looks like a colorized version of an old Perry Mason TV show, starring Renée Zellweger’s new face and Keanu Reeves, who has the charisma and animated visual appeal of a mud fence.”Keanu plays that over-used movie stereotype, the ethically challenged criminal defense lawyer.

And why always an ethically challenged defense lawyer? Why not an amoral ERISA or corrupt water rights lawyer? In truth it’s probably because ERISA and water rights lawyers would have to arm-wrestle to avoid the title of most boring field of practice.

In any event, Keanu’s much better as pup-loving legendary hitman John Wicknot as a lawyer. Just the same, I admit to liking his turn as the lawyer son of Satan in The Devil’s Advocate.

It’s true. Recliners have arrived at the cineplex, including the one in our neighborhood. I’m not sure, however, that Wonder Woman was better because my feet were up. The Whole Truth, on the other hand, is a different matter. The recliner would’ve meant In dormis delicto.

On Monday, June 20, 2016, a 48-year Phoenix temperature record was broken when the thermometer hit 116 by 3 pm. On the same day, the nation’s highest court further undermined the part of theFourth Amendment that safeguards individuals from unreasonable government searches and seizures. In Utah v. Strieff, No. 14-1373, the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the “exclusionary rule.” It’s the rule that excludes evidence from trial obtained by unconstitutional police conduct.

The case involved police officer Douglas Fackrell who without probable cause stopped Edward Strieff after Strieff left a South Salt Lake City house under police surveillance thanks to an anonymous drug tip. Strieff was arrested after Officer Fackrell discovered an outstanding arrest warrant for a minor traffic violation. A search of Strieff turned up methamphetamines and drug paraphernalia.

But if the stop was unlawful, shouldn’t the drugs have been excluded? Or did the existence of an outstanding arrest warrant weaken or attenuate the connection between the government’s misconduct and the discovery of the evidence?

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the evidence obtained was admissible “because the officer’s discovery of the arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the unlawful stop and the evidence seized incident to arrest.”

In spirited dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor declared:

“The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language: This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant.”

Justice Sotomayor particularly warned about the risk of “treating members of our communities as second-class citizens.”

“It is no secret,” she wrote,“that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny.” And she added, “. . . this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.”

Just 5 years ago, criminal defense lawyer Michael Cicchini deconstructed the ongoing erosion of our fundamental rights in Tried and Convicted. On the heels of Strieff, the bad news is that our individual rights continue being “hammered and softened by high court judicial decisions.” These rights are “intended to protect us from the vagaries of the criminal justice system” and from the “government agents” who “are easily able to bypass, and in fact destroy, our constitutional protections.”

By itself the disparity in Ramirez’s sentencing is nothing unusual. It’s commonplace. It’s only newsworthy because of the light touch administered on Turner.

According to Census and Dept. of Justice analyses by the Sentencing Project, racial disparity in sentencing and incarceration is real. Indeed, research by Dr. Ashley Nellis bears out that prosecutors and judges often treat blacks and Hispanics more harshly in their charging and sentencing decisions.

“Sentencing policies, implicit racial bias, and socioeconomic inequity contribute to racial disparities at every level of the criminal justice system. Today, people of color make up 37% of the U.S. population but 67% of the prison population. Overall, African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, they are more likely to face stiff sentences. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as non-Hispanic white men.”

I don’t have a team to root for in this Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIX. The Packers choked like Luca Brasi and the 49’ers were never in the hunt.

That said, I still plan to watch the game although not out of parochial loyalty because it’s hometown-hosted in Satan’s crotch.

Red carpet moment.

Thanks to the NFL’s marquee event, Arizona’s all over social media; the blogosphere; the traditional newscasts; and of course, all the sports channels.

Local chamber of commerce types have overstated their Op-eds and overcooked their media interviews with tongues and tails wagging like nervous Cocker Spaniels who piddle when guests ring the doorbell. Can’t fault them, though. This is Arizona’s red carpet moment.

“The Super Bowl of Sex.”

But the fact is, despite all the media hype and hoopla, I find myself agreeing with Matt Brown, one of my Arizona lawyer blogging amigos, who a few days ago was justifiably in high dudgeon not over the game but over crackdowns by “sociopathic authority figures” in the lead-up to the big game. Mix predatory cops, lazy prosecutors, broadly-worded criminal statutes and onerous mandatory sentences and you have a prescription for easy guilty plea deals for “Super Bowl Johns,” he opines in his post, “The Superbowl . . . Of Sex?,” which was not only aptly argued and titillatingly titled but amusingly angry.

According to local and national news media, the Phoenix forecast calls not for ‘haboobs’ — but hookers since allegedly, “hordes of sex-crazed Superbowl attendees are currently descending on our fair state with an unquenchable desire”for paid sex.

And while Arizona’s tourism boosters and business types want very much for the Super Bowl to give Arizona a chance to change its tarnished image, I tend to agree more with Matt Brown’s concluding paragraph, “If the powers that be in this state wanted to teach the rest of the country a lesson for thinking Arizona maybe wasn’t the cruel, backwards place it seems to be based on our government’s perpetual quest to out-stupid the rest of the country, mission accomplished. If the rest of the country is lucky, they’ll learn to not acknowledge us anymore. They’ll certainly not want to visit again, and I can’t blame them.”

Then again, dumb state or not some of you will think me cerebrally well-placed to live here since I was out golfing this past Saturday and Sunday when it was 100-plus outside. For some of you, this qualifies as dumb if not insane. And no matter those were days 7 and 8 on our consecutive day hit parade of triple-digit temperatures here with no relief in sight. But this is par for June. Usually the hottest month in Satan’s nether region, it’s also just the start of our summertime ‘comfort zone’ in Arizona. You either go out into the inferno or you stay home, sort your sock drawer, and gaze at your navel. And while I’m still planning on giving the local state bar another well-earned $3 hair cut, that post can keep. Instead, for all my friendly procrastinators waiting once again with under three weeks to spare before their annual June 30th fiscal year CLE deadline, here again is my now traditional fiscal year FREE CLE public service. With the usual disclaimers about content quality, continued availability and jurisdictional credit-worthiness, find the following FREE CLE: _____________________________________________________________________________________

ASU LAW CLE – PAY WHAT YOU WANT CLE

http://cle.asucollegeoflaw.com/voters-choice-cle-survey/#sthash.hrGrQ6KL.dpbs I have little doubt the Continuing Legal Education Program at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law is hoping very few, if anyone, takes them up on the “$0” option, which is part of their current offer of CLE based on a “pay what you want option.”You choose from their list of OnDemand recorded seminars and register for the program. You then “enter the amount you would like to pay. The amount you pay is unlimited and you can enter as little as $0. Once registered, you’ll receive the video access information and can follow the instructions to receive interactive CLE credit!” Of course, these are the same folks who lawyer-glut and back-breaking student school debts or not — have nonetheless shamelessly decided to move into a $120 million law school Taj Mahal in downtown Phoenix. According to the Arizona Republic, “in documents being presented to regents, ASU said the goal is to increase law-school enrollment and degrees by 50 percent.” http://youtu.be/Npp-uaJDmOw Meantime, the straight-faced ASU law school dean says of the Pay What You Want CLE: “Of course, we hope that most will still contribute something for the CLE credits they will earn. All proceeds will go to scholarships that will help us recruit high quality students, attract students that might otherwise not be able to afford law school, and have our new graduates enter the workforce with less debt burden.”

Of course, we hope that most will still contribute something for the CLE credits they will earn. All proceeds will go to scholarships that will help us recruit high quality students, attract students that might otherwise not be able to afford law school, and have our new graduates enter the workforce with less debt burden.” – See more at: http://cle.asucollegeoflaw.com/ondemand-pay-what-you-want-cle/#sthash.HZdrdunJ.dpuf

“I’d like to see lawyers for god’s sakes say something about the RULE OF LAW and doing what we came to do – ENHANCE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE FOR ALL,” a lawyer friend wrote me the other day.

Her words resonated with me on several levels. First there was that odious discriminatory bill passed by the Arizona Legislature. Dim-witted Governor Jan Brewer dallied, deliberated and finally vetoed it because as one pundit properly put it — because she was “more afraid of the Chamber of Commerce than the Tea Party.”Rogue Columnist Jon Talton had one of the better assessments about why crazy stuff like this keeps happening here in “Satan’s crotch” at “SB 1062: The aftermath.”

Second, I’ve been musing about justice, fairness and unfairness because I’m halfway through Houston death-penalty lawyer/professor David Dow’s The Autobiography of an Execution.

Read this excellent book and you can’t help but dwell on systemic unfairness and as a lawyer — about Dow’s statement, “Sometimes I think I became a lawyer because I believe rules matter, but I suppose I could have the cause and effect reversed.”

Author of six books, Dow is a strongly opinionated death-penalty opponent. He’s also litigation director at the Texas Defender Service and founder of Texas’s oldest innocence project, the Texas Innocence Network.

“I used to support the death penalty,”Dow writes. “I changed my mind when I learned how lawless the system is. If you have reservations about supporting a racist, classist unprincipled regime, a regime where white skin is valued far more highly than dark, where prosecutors hide evidence and policeman routinely lie, where judges decide what justice requires by consulting the most recent Gallup poll, where rich people sometimes get away with murder and never end up on death row, then the death-penalty system we have here in America will embarrass you no end.”

Third, ever since getting tossed out of 8th grade with a number of my classmates for what we thought was a principled stance but which the nuns strongly disagreed, I’ve tried to reconcile and admittedly without much success Calvin’s view of the world’s unfairness. Throughout the rest of my academic life and even into my corporate working life, I’ve weighed the merit and demerit cards life and circumstances have passed out.

So I’ve had this thing about fairness and unfairness for as long as I can remember. It matters most where the moral equities lie, especially now as a lawyer.

But I’ll not credit a lifelong creed with animating a desire to be a lawyer. That’s a romantic notion but it wouldn’t be true. No, a long extent and inherent disposition toward skepticism — even cynicism would forestall such idealized foolishness. Indeed, of cynicism I often joked that when I came out of the womb — I slapped the doctor first.

And finally, the past few months I’ve done more than contemplate my navel about this topic. Besides work and a personal life, I’ve been busy combating an unfairness just foisted on Arizona lawyers by our ‘friendly state bar.’

The mandatory bar and specifically, its board of governors finally succeeded in doing what they first tried in December. Last week they voted to raise our annual attorney licensing fees. No matter that they were already among the highest in the country. The easiest money to spend is always somebody else’s.

And unhappy with having to deal with the complaints of a restive lawyer hoi polloi, at one point the board even tried without success to tack on an automatic cost-of-living escalator tied to the consumer price index — as though what state bars do has anything to do with the price of milk and bread in Peoria — Arizona.

Now I’ll concede that compared to losing life, liberty or significant property interests, a dues increase is obviously a trifle, a thimble’s worth of irritation. “It’s not like we’re trying to cure cancer,” a colleague quipped.

But all the same, it was the same kind of bullshit unfairness that’s rankled and inflamed passions my whole life. I’ll have a lot more to say about it later.

But for now, I think another admonition from Christopher Hitchens is appropriate, “Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”

“Every big company has somebody like you. Somebody to wave his tiny fists in the air so we can all pretend to listen before we go do whatever it is we were going to do anyway.”– Vinny Duto, Alex Berenson’s The Night Ranger.

No surprise, it’s infernally hot again in Arizona. Almost five years ago, I moved here from a place where the wind howls liked Satan’s hound.

So ten days ago when I was elsewhere seeking temporary relief from the inferno, someone asked me three times that week, to consider and reconsider running for the State Bar’s Board of Governors. And three times it was “No, No, and Never.”And a rooster didn’t even crow once.

I might have cornily quoted Sherman — but I’d have meant it: “If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.”

The reasons are the same as two years agoeven assuming there’s a snow ball’s chance of getting elected. And re-invoking Groucho Marx, the Board hardly needs my help to further perfect “the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

Muzzle time.

Then there’s this. In my opinion, by enforcing a Code of Conduct requiring Board member loyalty and “respect” for “the validity of the Board’s decisions and their value to the organization, even if not in the voting majority,”the Bar imposes a prior restraint on my snark. Indeed, the Code further requires Board Members to “uphold and enhance the reputation and public image of the Bar.” And since this blog reeks with past, present and future irreverence about “your friendly state bar,”my opinions alone should disqualify.

And as for Board Candidates, I don’t mean the usual social-climbing suspects mouthing pro forma pabulum about “representing lawyers” — but who really run to burnish a resume or to self-pleasure an overweening ego.

Someone else should also replace the somnambulant ‘career’ governors, those status quo apologists who exude all the transformational leadership of a potted plant.

So realistically, the preferable option is to convert the Bar from mandatory to voluntary. Now there’s a fight worth having. It would at last compel the Bar to become lawyer-friendly — or else face members who vote with their feet.

It may be easier to get an audience with the Pope than to see a specialist to confirm my internist’s conclusion that my butt-kicking pneumonia was caused by valley fever, a dust-borne fungal respiratory infection endemic to what a lawyer buddy calls the “toxic” “Valley of the Sun.” Meanwhile, there’s a cobweb growing next to my phone awaiting the specialist’s promised return phone call.

With temporal powers over life and death, doctors like judges most personify Lord Acton’s exhortation,“There is no worse heresy then that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

And finally, speaking of busted balls, there’s another local politician who has long needed to be yanked by the balls . . . of his feet. It’s the redoubtable fool Russell Pearce who has been deservedly catching holy hell for what he posted on Facebook on Saturday in the aftermath of the horrific massacre in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater.

The illegal-immigrant-bashing Russell Pearce was the once feared and all-powerful President of the Arizona Senate. the man who proudly spawned Arizona’s Immigration Law (SB 1070) from the depths of his loins. But he was then unceremoniously dumped out of office via an unexpected voter recall.

“This is certainly a time for prayers for the victims and the families of victims in this horrific crime in Colorado. I just had a call from a very good friend of mine in San Diego, California who’s neice Kim, Kim’s best friend Mikayla and Kevin were in the Theater in the front rows. Kim and Kevin got out and as he was trying to get Mikayla out she said she was shot. As the rush of the crowd exiting through the exit door pushed Kevin and Kim out they lost Mikayla.

“As of my phone conversation they were not aware of her status. What a heart breaking story. Had someone been prepared and armed they could have stopped this “bad” man from most of this tragedy. He was two and three feet away from folks, I understand he had to stop and reload. Where were the men of flight 93???? Someone should have stopped this man. Someone could have stopped this man. Lives were lost because of a bad man, not because he had a weapon, but because noone was prepared to stop it. Had they been prepared to save their lives or lives of others, lives would have been saved.

“All that was needed is one Courages/Brave man prepared mentally or otherwise to stop this it could have been done. When seconds count, police are ony minutes away. My prayers are with all of those suffering from this sensless act, may God be with them in this moment of pain and heartache.”